Ick

I’m fighting an infection- a small cut on my left hand, pointer finger- that’s gotten infected by the antibiotic- resistant staph that’s going around. I spent a week in the hospital, on IV antibiotics- then was sent home on oral antibios. Some days are better, some worse- today I’m listless and edgy, stir crazy and feeling a little unwell. No fever, but the swelling is still there and today there was some definitive oozing; the finger hurts slightly- but that started after I was wringing the finger out re : oozing fairly roughly.

My sense of stir craziness and blahs almost makes the hospital a desirable change… almost. But I’ve done that, I know better.

If there is no improvement, back I go. I the meantime, I’m just gonna bang my head against the wall awhile.

MRSA is nasty stuff… I’m still a carrier, though it’s been over a year since it’s flared. It hurts like a sonofabitch, but when it hurts too much squeeze the utter living hell out of it (or have someone else do it)… A lot of the pain is from the pressure it’s putting on your skin. Hurts like hell to have it squeezed, but that’ll subside and feel better after. We discovered that once you open it the first time, if you keep the actual opening covered with neosporin and a band-aid, it won’t close up between then and the time you have to drain it next, and that is at least SOME of the pain you don’t have to deal with.

Once you have it, it’ll flare randomly for a few months. It looks like a zit at first, but it will end up within a few hours with a red area the size of a quarter. Lance it quickly and keep draining it every few hours. It will keep it from getting huge and horrible.

The first one, I ended up in the hospital and let them treat it. I have a quarter size scar from them slicing me open and packing it, and it took months to heal. The subsequent ones we treated at home by the aforementioned method, and they were fully healed and gone inside of a week. It flared for about 6 months, then went dormant. I haven’t had an outbreak of it in over a year. I’m still carrying it – it doesn’t leave without extraordinary measures to purge it from your bloodstream. But it’s actually pretty manageable as long as you catch it quickly.